


Spell and Counterspell

by Gray Cardinal (Gray_Cardinal)



Category: Gargoyles (TV), Young Wizards - Diane Duane
Genre: Crossover, Gen, Xanatos Gambits
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-11
Updated: 2013-12-11
Packaged: 2018-01-04 08:15:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,687
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1078679
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gray_Cardinal/pseuds/Gray%20Cardinal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Rirhath B Crossings, just look at the stars,</i>
  <br/><i>How do you spell it without any Rs?</i>
</p>
<p>(Or, what happens when a certain morally ambiguous billionaire shows up at the Crossings for purposes which probably don't bear looking at too closely.  Written for "A Ficathon Walks Into a Bar".)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Spell and Counterspell

**Author's Note:**

> **Disclaimer:** David Xanatos and the Gargoyles universe are the creations of Greg Weisman and reside under the Disney corporate umbrella. Dairine Callahan and the Young Wizards universe (multiverse?) were created by and belong to Diane Duane.
> 
> **A Note on Chronology:** In order to expedite the crossover, the present story follows the timeline of the Young Wizards books as originally published, as opposed to that of the recent “New Millennium” editions. The following events should be presumed to occur sometime following the second full season of Gargoyles (like almost everyone else, I’m ignoring the “Goliath Chronicles” episodes), and sometime between the events of Wizard’s Holiday and A Wizard of Mars.

There were at least two dozen varieties of aliens in the bar – metallic-skinned centipedes, bipedal cats, glass spiders, many-tentacled _things_ , and beings with forms that defied easy description.  And then there was the perfectly normal human girl – barely into her teens, by the look – sitting alone near the back, wearing a _Star Wars_ T-shirt and typing briskly away on a laptop computer. 

David Xanatos paid only enough attention to the clientele to make sure he didn’t step on anyone’s extremities as he wove his way between the tables to the tween girl’s booth.  He studied her critically for a moment, arching an eyebrow.  “Are you sure—?“

She looked up, eyeing him right back, and said two words in a language he didn’t recognize.  At his lack of response, she switched to English.  “They serve all ages till four hours after local sunset.  See the sign?”

Xanatos followed her gesture to a wall-mounted notice with a short paragraph printed in half a dozen different scripts, all of them equally unreadable.  “I’ll take your word for it.”

“You should,” she told him.  “I’m a regular.  You, on the other hand, look like you’re a long way from home.”

“Unintentionally, I assure you.  One minute I was strolling through Grand Central Station in Manhattan, the next....”  He flicked a hand toward the bar entrance and the wide, bustling promenade beyond it.  “As you say, a long way from home.  And I’m not sure the authorities here will recognize my passport – or my credit cards.”  _At least, not yet._

“You might be surprised,” the girl said, favoring him with a sideways look.  “Still – I take it you’re looking for a ticket home?”

Xanatos gave her his best innocent-looking smile.  “That would be...helpful, yes.  And clearly, you know your way around out here better than I do.”  _For the moment, at least_.

That prompted a quick laugh.  “Finally, someone who appreciates me.  And I only had to travel halfway across the galaxy.”  She cut herself off.  “But let’s get you taken care of.  If too many people notice you’re not where you should be, things could get...sticky.”

“Indeed.  So, what do you need from me?”

The girl’s fingers were already dancing across her laptop’s keyboard.  “Full name, to start.”  At his quizzical glance, she shrugged.  “I’m writing you the equivalent of an interstellar airline ticket.  If everything on the paperwork isn’t absolutely accurate, things can go wrong.  Spectacularly.”

“Point taken,” he said, careful not to appear miffed.  “Very well, then: David Xanatos – that’s Xanatos with an X – at your service.”  _At her age, I suppose, she might not follow the news enough to recognize me.  I can work with that._

There was a fraction of a moment’s pause.  “ _Oh_ ,” said the girl, eyeing him again.  “As in Xanatos Enterprises, with the castle on top of your skyscraper?”

_Not so ill-informed after all._   “Exactly.  And now that I’ve properly introduced myself....”

The girl’s face flushed briefly.  “Dairine Callahan,” she said.  “On – let’s call it an independent study project.  With all the appropriate paperwork,” she added, a certain fierce note entering her expression.

_Errantry, you mean.  But I won’t tell if you won’t._   “Of course.  And you were writing me an interstellar airline ticket.”

“More or less,” said Dairine.  “Let’s get the rest of your information plugged in.”

Xanatos’ eyebrows went up a couple of times as Dairine typed.  “Favorite color?” he echoed.

“Standard security question.  You could give me the name of your favorite sci-fi TV series instead....”

“Fire-engine red.”

“Check.  Last instance of non-linear temporal displacement.”

“Non-linear--?”  _How the hell does she know I’ve time-traveled?_

“Time travel,” Dairine corrected, simplifying.  “It turns out you already have a file in the universal registry – which simplifies things a little – but the indexing’s kind of fuzzy.  If I enter the time-stamp for this trip wrong, you could find yourself in a _Groundhog Day_ loop.”

_Damn.  That actually makes sense._ “And we wouldn’t want that.  Well, then: from November 6th, 1995 to November 1st, 975, and back again.  And I trust that the records you’re accessing are normally kept confidential.”

Dairine gave him a conspiratorial grin.  “The Crossings’ regular transit databases are one thing; they’re secured, but they’re like regular airline records.  Anybody with the right clearances can get in, like say local law enforcement.  What I’m tapping is the underlying datastream – basically the raw feed of local reality, for relative values of ‘local’.   The bad news is that you really, really don’t want to edit or erase the record on that level, so the information is always gonna be there.  The good news is that almost nobody ever pokes that deeply into the raw feed – trust me, you do _not_ want to see the kind of math it takes to arm-wrestle this stuff.  So if you don’t tell anybody, and I don’t tell anybody, nobody will ever know you were even here.”

“Excellent,” said Xanatos.  “And you can manage all that on an ordinary laptop?”

“Oh, this is a custom model.  Has to be, to access the local networks up here.”

“I see.”  _I need to get my hands on one of those._   “I don’t suppose—”

Dairine shook her head.  “You wouldn’t want one like this.  They’re still in beta-test, the software is kind of unpredictable, and anyway, my advisors keep a really strict eye on their inventory.”  There was a two-toned raspberry-like _beep-BZZZ_ from the laptop.  “See, it’s acting up already.  Now stop that,” she said, eyeing the screen with a severe look.

She tapped a short sequence of keys and nodded as a small memory card popped out of the computer’s side.  “All set up.  Go back out front and turn right; there’ll be a row of gates in the center of the promenade about a hundred yards down.  There’s a reader built into each gate arch; pick a line, wait your turn, and insert this into the reader just before you pass through.  That should get you back to Manhattan with no trouble.”

“Thank you very much, Ms. Callahan,” Xanatos said, again projecting as much sincerity as he could.  “I owe you a rather large favor.”

“I’ll make a note,” Dairine told him.  “Better go catch your gate.  There’s a twenty-minute time limit on the sp-mm, transit window; if you stay longer, the arrival point’s liable to shift.  You might end up landing on the Moon, only without a space suit.”

_Damn_ , Xanatos thought again.  _I was hoping for more time to shop.  Ah, well, there’s always next time._   “Au revoir, Ms. Callahan,” he said cheerily as he stood up and headed for the door.

#

“She blocked me!  That waif of a teenaged girl actually blocked me!”

Owen Burnett frowned at his employer.  “Are you certain, sir?”

“There’s no other explanation,” Xanatos said, his tone half annoyance and half admiration.  “I can’t get through the Grand Central nexus for love nor money nor magic, I can’t find or build any other sort of portal, and all I get is static on that whole range of back-channel comm frequencies I tagged while I was there.  I’m locked out, and she’s the only one who could have done it.”

Owen allowed a trace of one eyebrow to rise past the upper rim of his glasses.  “That would appear to be conclusive.”

“You’ve tracked her identity by now, I hope?”

“Dairine Callahan,” Owen said promptly.  “Resident of Hempstead, New York, living with her father and an older sister; the mother is deceased.  She and the sister are both Errantry-sworn wizards; from what I can discern, Dairine is the stronger of the two but has less experience.  Their neighbors, Tom Swale and Carl Romeo, are also Errantry-sworn, and relatively high in their order’s hierarchy.”

“I see,” said Xanatos thoughtfully.

“Indeed.  And your next move will be?”

Xanatos chuckled.  “One catches more wizards with honey, Owen.  I think we should offer Ms. Callahan a job.  Don’t you think it’s past time we set you up with a student intern?”

#

 “You met _who_ up in the Crossings?”  Tom Swale set a glass of lemonade on the kitchen table in front of his guest, his tone one of shocked disbelief.

“David Xanatos – as in _the_ David Xanatos, with the castle and the magical-artifact obsession and all those kerfuffles with gargoyles.  Spot brought up his file the second he walked into the bar,” Dairine said, grinning.  “I think he was looking to get into the black market in alien weapons tech.  From what Rhiow said, he’d been running surveillance on the Grand Central gates for weeks, watching for a chance to slip through on someone else’s transit.”

“So what did you do?”

“I gave him what he asked me for – a gate ticket home.”  Tom’s eyebrows arched, and Dairine laughed.  “Don’t worry; I added a rider to the spell.  He won’t be able to go off-planet again without an actual spaceship.  And Rhiow and the cats are working on blocking his access to the alien shopping channels, so he can’t get in the way Carmela did.”

“Good work, then,” Tom said.  “One laser dissociator in a wizardly household, we can cope with.  A non-wizard importing weapons wholesale, we definitely don’t need.”  He paused.  “How much about us did he pick up?”

Dairine grinned at him.  “If he has the Speech, I’m a centipede’s maiden aunt,” she said, “and neither one of us said word one about magic – but I guarantee you he had me pegged for a wizard right off the bat.  And he’d have loved a good look at Spot, but he didn’t get that either.”

“So our covers are secure?”

“Not exactly,” Dairine said.  “I did kind of introduce myself.”

“Oh, Lord,” Tom said at once.  “With his resources, that’s enough for Xanatos to locate you, me, and probably Kit’s family into the bargain.  This could get complicated.  What were you _thinking_?”

Dairine’s grin returned, fiercer than ever.  “That he’ll get in touch within a week,” she said, “with a job offer.  And with all the hoodoo Xanatos is supposed to be getting up to, don’t you think we ought to have someone on the inside?”

# # #


End file.
